Creatures, gore, ambiences and stingers.
Sound effects and sample packs for horror: creature vocals, body and gore foley, haunted ambiences, drones and jump-scare stingers.
Sound packs are raw material. Used straight, they can sound generic; layered under music, pitched and processed, they give a cue texture and a sense of something physically present.
Creature sounds are pure sound design, but tucked under your music they tell the listener something physical is in the room. Pitch them, reverse them, and blend them with your own vocal noises.
Start with: Untamed: Creature Vocals · BEASTIARIUM: Monsters & Creatures
See all 3 tools →Wet, fleshy foley is body horror in a sound. Try it as percussion: a squelch or a crunch on the downbeat can say more than another drum hit.
Start with: Carnage · Overkill - Gore And Splatter
See all 2 tools →Field recordings are the sounds of the unseen. Someone drops a can in the other room, and there's no one in the other room. Use them as atmosphere under your score, not just as foley.
Start with: Eerie Forest · Haunting Ambiences
See all 2 tools →Ready-made drone beds save a lot of time. Use them as the bed, then add the movement yourself: ride the EQ, add tiny pitch bends on a second layer, and bring layers in and out.
Start with: Sinister · Doom Drones
See all 4 tools →Stingers punctuate, a bit like a cymbal on a drum kit. The trick with jump scares is the quiet before. Against silence, something loud seems even louder.
Start with: Puncture
See all 1 tool →Somebody whispering in your ear as you walk down a dark corridor, and there's no one there. Put whispers in a reverb, move them around the stereo field and keep them low in the mix.
Start with: The Magic Whisper Collection
See all 1 tool →The slow stuff: a low drone, the rumbling of doom, the sense that something bad is going to happen and we don't know when.
Notes fighting each other and wanting to return home. In horror, we never quite let them.
All about contrast. Against quiet, something loud seems even louder, so the silence before matters as much as the hit.
Unsettling isn't the same as tense. Two things that don't get on: notes, instruments or vibes that shouldn't be together.
Things that shouldn't be there: pure sine tones with glide and vibrato, whispers, and sounds with no visible source.
Organic, wet and close. Sounds the listener feels in the body, not just hears.
Atmosphere is the mood of a place. What type of drone, and what is it doing? Even a drone can change how a scene feels.
Ritual and religion. The organ comes with churches, funerals and graveyards built in, and chant-like voices do the rest.
Metal, machinery and noise. Found sounds and distortion that turn pipes and factories into something hostile.
Too big to understand. Vast spaces and music with no tonal home, so the listener has nothing to hold on to.
Candlelit and old-world: organs, strings, and the odd waltz for vampires dancing.
Old, rural and wrong: acoustic instruments, voices and simple melodies taken out of context.
Most packs are WAV files that work in any DAW. Check sample rate and whether sounds are dry or processed.
Sound-effect licences vary more than sample-library licences. Check commercial and broadcast use.
Choose packs with clean, varied source material you can transform, rather than finished one-shot effects.
A creature vocal library of 3,991 sounds in 676 stereo WAV files (13.41 GB).
A library of 1,773 creature sounds in 24-bit/96 kHz WAV (3.81 GB) covering 24 types of fantasy monster, animal and insect.
A construction kit of 400 zombie crowd sounds (401 files, 24-bit/192 kHz, 12.4 GB, about 208 minutes) performed by eight vocal stunt performers.
A whisper and spoken-voice library of about 980 sounds in 196 files (24-bit/96 kHz, 5.72 GB), split into raw, stylised and designed sets.
Thirty night-time forest ambiences (over 154 minutes, 24-bit/96 kHz WAV, stereo and surround) recorded in dense forests in Transylvania and Moldova, Romania, in 2017.
A gore library of 3,390 sounds in 607 WAV files (24-bit/96 kHz, about 5.7 GB, about 160 minutes).
A collection of 120 ambient drone loops (24-bit/96 kHz WAV, 3 GB), 60 by SoundMorph's Jason Cushing from field recordings and subtle tonal design and 60 by electronic musician Arovane using synthetic textures.
A collection of more than 375 dark drones, textures, ambiences, pulses and stingers (24-bit/96 kHz WAV, 7.6 GB) by Charles Maynes and Jason Payne.
Nine horror ambience construction kits with split stems (46 files, 24-bit/96 kHz, 4.4 GB, about 136 minutes), themed as a haunted factory, forest, house, neighbourhood, sewers and swamp, plus nightmare, zombie apocalypse and torture chamber.
A string-based horror sound library performed on home-made "nightmare instruments": ghostly bowing, harmonics, scrapes and warped resonances, plus breaths, metallic textures, whooshes and impacts.
A jump-scare library of stingers, impacts and sharp bursts, with ready-made designed scares and a construction kit of the individual stems behind them so you can rebuild each one.
A gore library of flesh, bone, cuts, stabs, breaks and splatter, as designed sounds plus construction-kit recording sessions for building your own.
A cosmic-horror sound library of synthetic, textural sounds that feel almost recognisable: atmospheres, textures, braaams, horns, transitions, warped vocal beds and pings, as designed sounds and construction-kit layers.
No tools match those filters.
